The Problem with Neil Blomkamp's District9

Hello, this is Steve Barnes talking to you today. And sometimes I do these things pretty spontaneous. Other times I have to read because it's a complex topic subject. And today you're going to have to tolerate me doing a little bit of reading here because it is a very complex topic and I wanted to address it. What if I was to. Well, first of all, if you like this talk, please, please share it. That's how we know that you liked it. These talks deal with technologies and attitudes that come out of life writing. The basic idea is that you take the hero's journey and you take the chakras as the X and the Y axes. I don't know what the z axis is. I really don't. I put a lot of thought into it. Different ideas have come to me and I kind of suspect that. That you're not supposed. I'm not supposed to nail that down, that I contrive. But today I'm going to use the idea that human beings are basically equal, just as groups, that there is variation within the group, of course, but the variation between the groups on a genetic level is minor in comparison to the effects of environment. And it's just a belief, it's a faith. And let's see what happens if we examine this from this position. A few weeks ago, we're going to talk about the movie District 9 today. We talked about it yesterday in our Afrofuturism class, and it triggered some discussion. I thought that would be useful to address this directly. A few weeks ago, Tananarive went over to a local park to pick up Jason, and there were police there. A bunch of kids clustered on the police. And Tanamoree's thought was not, this is a happy community outreach thing. She thought Trayvon Martin. She thought something bad had happened to our boy. You know, Jason is getting to that age where young black boys have their parents have, you know, the talk with them about how to deal with the police. And it's talk that very few whites that I've met have a grasp of. To them, the police are basically helpers, quite often the thin blue line. What they don't realize is that for centuries we've been the ones on the other side of that thin blue line. And it looks very different from that position. Very different indeed. Before I continue, I want to state my position clearly. I've done years of research and have written half a million published words on the subject of race and probably another million words that have been blogged and so forth and so on. My official attitude is that good or bad, we're pretty much equal. That apparent inequalities are because of different circumstances or initial starting conditions, not anything innate between the people. So guilt and shame on either side, black or white, is nothing but a lingering belief that we are not equal. Only this time it's turned inward instead of outward. We're all in this together, and anyone who senses a different attitude on my part is 100% welcome and invited and requested to challenge me on this subject and ask me to prove how I believe we're all equal. If I say X, Y or Z, I don't believe that stupidity, incapacity or evil cluster on any corner of the genetic closet like toxic dust bunnies. No, we're pretty much the same. Okay, we discussed District 9 in our Afrofuturism class. As I said, a film where the I believe the director, writer Neil Blomkamp, allowed his unconscious racial attitudes to shape his narrative in some unfortunate ways. The story of aliens suffering apartheid in South Africa was a brilliant conceit. In the short film version, which is called Alive Joburg, which you can find on YouTube, but in feature form, something went wrong. My theory is simple. If you have a deeply ingrained negative attitude you're a bit ashamed of, you can keep control of it so long as you can maintain conscious attention, conscious focus right there. But under stress, your real attitudes emerge. If you're tired, you're angry, you're drunk, you're overwhelmed, that flat rock of control flips over and the crawlies emerge. Alive in Jo Burg was small enough that Blomkamp could keep the entire project in conscious focus and the creative aspects aligned with the technical and aligned with the philosophical, at least what he consciously believed himself to believe or wanted to believe. But Blomkamp is a white South African, which makes him much like a white Southerner, someone dealing with the legacy of horror and oppression. It took a lot of generations deep removal from those days, those bad days for those, you know, removal from those who were committed to and defended the sin of slavery to raise generations of Southerners who have a different perspective. I meant many of them different perspective. They don't feel connected to what happened. They don't own what happened. They don't just. They don't defend what happened. And they can grasp how horrible things were and thus grasped that the descendants of slaves really did suffer enough pressure to explain the disparity in performance. And they found the ability to be able to celebrate their ancestors without having to wear blinders about their failings critical. This is necessary if you want to believe in full equality. Without that, you can pretend to believe it, you can want to believe it, you can feel social pressure to believe it, but in your heart you don't. There'll be dissonance between what you feel and what you think or what you think and what you say. My favorite test for these attitudes is the question, under the same historical circumstances, would whites have suffered as much from slavery and been damaged as long? Anything other than a swift and clear yes. And I think you're trying to wire around a nasty little minefield. A belief that whites would have done better, but you can't quite say that out loud. Or an unconscious belief causing stress as you try to work through it. Any hesitation fumfa protest about the theoretical nature of the question comparison with European immigrants. I mean, remember, every white person in this country is an immigrant or descendant from one. So what are you really saying? Refusal to answer or anything else is evidence of conscious or unconscious conflict on this part. I can turn that around. Racism in blacks will be revealed by the thought that if she had been on the other foot, they wouldn't have done the same things. They wouldn't have been as evil, they wouldn't have been as oblivious, they wouldn't have been as self serving, you know, yada yada, yada. No, I mean, like I said, I did two books on that subject and my attitude is really clear and it's in alignment. I think people are just people get over it. The problem with District 9 is that it places blacks and as secondary in their own country. It's a tale of alien apartheid, okay? Seen through the eyes of an Africaner who is accidentally infected with alien DNA and becomes alien and so forth and so on. All the decisions and power players in this entire story are white. Well, you could say that's a conscious political statement on the part of the director. Yeah, but if that's true, then you have the responsibility of showing the inwardness of the Africans. Since you're suggesting that apartheid never really ended, it just shifted from one group to another. You have to show that the Africans are as human by showing their loves, lives, families. One character would have done it. If you don't do that, you're opening your opening the door to a suspicion belief that apartheid was justified. The aliens are shown as fully emotional and sentient beings with hopes and dreams, intellect, courage and families. The white people are shown as fully emotional and sentient beings with hopes, dreams, intellect, courage and families. The blacks, not so much. No. I don't for a moment buy this was a deliberate or valid tactic to condemn racism. Yada, yada, yada. Science fiction did this for a century, talking about using aliens as metaphors for racial others while excluding blacks and Asians from anything but secondary roles, if that. For most of my life, I could walk into a science fiction bookstore and find thousands of books whose covers and content featured nothing but what I called white people and their imaginary friends. You know, aliens, robots, whatever. As soon as it started changing, predictably, there were complaints of PC. PC from those who never claim, never complained about the exclusion. I wonder why. I mean, the problem here, of course, is that all human beings try to create the universe in their own image. They create the universe so that it looks like them. They're central to creation. Everything else is secondary. Science fiction is just this. It's neither better nor worse than anything else. If there's a problem, it's that it thought it was better. Aliens and robots do not represent us. Perhaps they represent the white. White people see us, which is pretty awful if you stop and think about it. There's not the slightest concern for how we might feel to look at these images. And that's the lack of extending your own humanity to others. You don't think, you don't care how they feel when you simultaneously appropriate the imagery of their oppression to tell stories that creates the appearance of an honest conversation. You know, look at all the laudatory interviews in articles concerning District 9, but you're actually saying nothing at all. Who in District 9 is the black character whose home life we see most clearly and therefore experiences inwardness? It's the Nigerian ganglord, a murderous, superstitious, lying, brutal bastard. The director said that, well, you know, in defense, there were such people, they caused problems, and that's true. But there are also millions of decent, loving, intelligent black people with courage, inwardness and sensuality and everything else. And the director chose not to humanize even one of them, except very peripherally. You don't really see them. That was his choice in the short subject that made this, that the film came from. He actually did have a balance between them. It looked much better. The metaphor worked in that case. But in the full length film, it feels like the director is his lead character, a man who thinks he's more woke than he really is, who must be infected by that alien DNA in a sort of alien like me scenario before he can begin to understand to that degree. The film is pretty naked and interesting in a way. The director is exposing his own wounds, the gap between what he wants to believe we are all equal and what he actually believes. Whites are more human. You can't help it. Ultimately, under stress, the truth will out and the making of a full motion picture is a massive undertaking. I think he simply couldn't keep it all under control and to keep control of everything he was thinking and feeling at a deep level at the same time. Does that make District 9 a bad film? No, no, it makes it a tough film in some ways, an honest film. When you talk about art being expression of the self, it's especially going to be tough for those who want to believe that racial attitudes are rare now. Tribalism is nearly universal and racism is just a more specific and toxic form of tribalism. It's extraordinary to actually believe in equality, give lip service to it. Easy. Believe in it. Tough Takes serious energy to burn away the billions of subtle and explicit inputs to the contrary. In media and history books everywhere in America we're swarming with it to the degree that if you genuinely follow the implications of human equality, you will run into vast armies of people defending the defenders of slavery, defending the symbols and criticizing those who dare to suggest that there might be something wrong with this. Attacking those who want or support equality, attempting to gaslight them on a massive cultural level, trying to avoid the guilt and shame and fear that would result from really understanding what happened. From the safety of being the heroes of the story. America can condemn the Holocaust. It's terrible. Couldn't happen here. Except it did. It didn't look the same. It was chronic instead of acute slow motion over centuries from 1619 to arguably about 1970, rather than compressed into 11 years, 1933 to about 1945, but cost about the same number of man years of life. All you have to do to determine that is track the difference in life expectancy and infant mortality. Equal horror, in my opinion. And unlike the Holocaust, the perpetrators were never punished, never forced to confront. Their victims were able to promote their version of reality and deny, deny, deny the truth. Plenty of our fellow citizens still defend the event, its after effects and current manifestations. I've watched otherwise decent people mocking and joking about Trayvon Martin, about church slaughters, believing BLM protest marches were pretending to be frightened. It's an eye opener. I actually had, just within the last couple weeks, had one person telling me that black fears for our children were an inconvenience in comparison to things happening elsewhere in the world. I'm the one who held Tananarif when she came back from the park shaking. Inconvenience my ass. It is not an inconvenience. If you believe your lives are not as important, your children are not as precious, and that the very police force you fear is the force the majority population considers to be acting in their interests, that they will automatically side with the police. Even in instances where there are videos of beatings and shootings of unarmed people, the temptation is to think that those officers are acting out the unconscious or unspoken desires of their supporters, that they are the tip of the spear, the active arm of their paymasters. They are not separate from the rest of the community. They are the ID of that community. And so long as they do not admit that they do not fully embrace equality, no conversation, laws or smaller actions will have much effect for very long. The rubber band will snap back into its original shape as soon as Attention flags I read an article in Quora about how narcissists trap you. Terms like gaslighting, scapegoating, divide and conquer, playing the victim, vilifying true victims. The smear campaign, silent treatment, guilt trips, and cycles of abuse. I was immediately struck by how many of these apply to racism. Gaslighting slavery wasn't that bad. The north is as bad for racism, the Civil War wasn't about slavery, etc. Scapegoating the problems within the black community are solely its own fault. Immigrants got over it. Divide and conquer. You're not one of them, Steve. You're one of us. Grading evaluating people based on skin color or perceived whiteness of speech. You speak so well. Perceived intelligence, whatever. Connecting economic or moral issues for black conservatives. But you have to stay in the tent and agree or be silent upon racial issues. Oh that's. That's fantastic. Trap playing the victim. Southerners are oppressed. The northerners were the oppressors. White people are oppressed. Vilifying true victims. Unarmed black shot dead in the street were thugs. The smear campaign bringing up the supposedly criminal past of said victim shot dead in the street. The silent treatment. Refusing to hear the screams of the bereaved, not even believing their guilt and their grief and fear are real. Forgive and forget. Let's move on from the past without ever fully admitting wrongdoing in the first place. Guilt trips. Africans enslaved blacks and sold them to whites. Cycles of abuse, dangling freedom and equality if you'll just shut up about oppression. No, I don't think so. How many of these apply to South Africa? I honestly haven't studied them enough to say, but they certainly did a divide and conquer scenario with the coloreds. The temptation is to think that, yeah, there's a lot of similarity because remember my initial hypothesis, we're all just basically people. Any tactic, strategy or action you see is just an emergent quality from basic human things. It's just wired into us. Under different circumstances, the same crap will start leaking out. Here's a definition of narcissism. Self centeredness arising from failure to distinguish the self from external objects, either in very young babies or as a feature of mental disorder. What causes failure to mature? One is a gap between deep beliefs and your stated actions and your stated beliefs and actions you cannot follow two paths at once. Tears you apart and denies you the energy you need to awaken and mature. What can cause a failure to fully accept human equality? The realization that the people and heroes you admire were less than you think. But note that you don't have to demonize them. You don't have to think that they're less than humanity as a whole. If whites were and are victims of these poisonous perceptions, so are black people, Asians and whatever. It's a nearly universal human illness and it's painful to awaken from it. District 9 is a film about black pain for white people. It has no apparent concern for how black people might feel watching the appropriation of their agony. It is narcissistic and nearly solipsistic. A film made by a man is probably a good man, certainly a talented and intelligent man who has not worked out his issues as thoroughly as he, in his circle of advisors, probably believe. Instead of patting himself on the back, he needs a slap in the face and a scream of wake up. My goal is simple. 1 million awake, aware adult human beings. The path is clear. To support thousands of writers and artists who believe in human equality and are willing to stand up to those who ask us to go back to sleep. You are my brothers and sisters. You are my tribe. All you have to do to escape the trap is to refuse the tainted ego bait. Simply believe that we are basically equal. If you see unequal results, there had to be unequal circumstances, simple as that. That simple belief sets you free. Then the hero's journey and the chakras, the tools of life writing, show you everything you could ever want to know about the world that we've created and that we share, as well as the path out of the political and social swamp that we find ourselves in. In other words, you're just one decision away from the peace you've always sought and the understanding that we need. Let's go. If you've enjoyed this, please share it with your friends. I wish you a wonderful Sunday and I want to close this with the expression that the divinity within me salutes and acknowledges the divinity within each and every one of you. Namaste. Take care.